The second week of January provided us with some important recaps of 2018 as a couple of notable Player of the Year awards were announced. We’ll start there as we recap this week’s poker news:

Schindler Wins 2018 Card Player Of The Year Award

As we start the New Year, awards for accolades in the previous year will be announced and Jake Schindler was one of the early big winners. He has been named the 2018 Card Player of the Year, which is something he clearly deserved.

Schindler’s main feat from the past year was to blow away the previous record for the number of final-table tournament finishes in a single calendar year. The previous record was 23, set by Bryn Kenney in 2017. Schindler’s total in 2018, however, was an incredible 31 final tables.

That was hardly the only noteworthy thing Schindler achieved this past season as he also won over $8.7 million in prize money. He won six tournaments while securing two of the three biggest individual paydays in his career. That has catapulted him to 14th on the all-time poker money list.

In terms of the points race, which is part of this process of arriving at the Player of the Year Award, Schindler racked up a lot of points by getting to the final table in multiple tournaments with 500 or more players and a $5,000 buy-in price point. Two final tables in tournaments with those parameters and requirements gave him almost 25 percent of his 2018 point total.

This is Schindler’s first POY title as he finished eighth in 2014, fifth in 2016, and 15th in 2017. Schindler won his first two championships of the year in March and made five final tables in May, roaring through the spring and accumulating a lot of the results which enabled his year-long consistency to translate into Player of the Year honors.

Bicknell Wins GPI Player Of The Year For The Second Straight Year

Kirsten Bicknell has now gone back-to-back. For the second consecutive year, she won the Female GPI Player of the Year Award, stacking a 2018 title on top of 2017.

It was a fairly lucrative year for the poker pro as she notched her seven-figure year of earnings. She cashed in at 28 separate events, earning $1,095,611.

While she had a lot of nice runs in 2018, she’ll probably feel like she fell short a number of times. Her main goal for 2019 is to get her first million-dollar win at a tournament. Her average win in 2018 was just under $40,000.

WSOP Anounces Mini Edition Of Main Event

2019 will mark the 50th edition of the World Series of Poker. It’ll be a special edition commemorating the half-century of action and as a result, we are going to see some special events. 13 new events have been added to the roster, including a $1000 Mini Main Event.

The Mini Main Event will be taking place just two days before the actual Main Event. Similar to the big event, the mini version will see players start out with 60,000 in chips and will have the same blind structure. The main difference is that the blinds will go up every 30 minutes instead of 120, so that will speed things up significantly.